Forest
Stewardship News Release
September
27, 2005- For Immediate Release
Contact: Allyson
Muth , Phone: 814-863-0401 E-mail: abm173@psu.edu
Forest Food: Mast
Written by: Jim Finley, 814-863-0401, fj4@psu.edu
Autumn is harvest time – a time of bounty. Animals prepare for winter by adding fat or by storing or caching nuts and fruits for the winter from the produce. Our forests are an important source of food for many wildlife species. Mast is a common word describing forest-derived food. Derived from old English, “mast” means literally forest food, the nuts and seeds that accumulate on the forest floor.
Walking through a forest in the autumn, many people almost instinctively look for mast – the acorns, beechnuts, hickory nuts that ripen this time of year. Fall is a good time to evaluate the forest’s potential to provide important food resources to prepare wildlife for winter. However, to provide for food for wildlife, it is necessary to evaluate a forest’s potential to provide mast throughout the year. Is there mast available in all seasons?
Mast can be either hard or soft. Hard mast is the nuts and acorns. Soft mast is the berries, cherries, maple seeds, and other fleshy seeds produced by the forest. While many plants yield their seeds in the fall, others provide seeds at other times in the year. Mast available in the summer is unlikely to still be available in the winter. To meet the needs of diverse wildlife species, it is essential to have diverse mast production, with different species producing mast at different times of the year.
Mast diversity may be a measure of forest health. Consider a forest with only one tree species producing mast. If an insect, disease, or natural disaster occurs, everything depending on that mast is at risk. However, if the forest has a mix of tree species, the loss of one may not be as devastating. The oak forests common to much of the Northeast provide an excellent example of the merits of diversity.
The acorns of red oaks take two summers to mature, while the acorns on white oaks mature in one summer. If a late spring frost happens to kill the flowers of both red and white oaks, there is still the potential to have acorns in the mast mix that fall, because the red oaks may have set fruit the year before. While the amount of mast may be down, wildlife species depending on acorns still have something available to them. Careful forest management can help you to maintain oak diversity as well as create or retain tree species diversity.
Hard mast is normally associated with fall, but soft mast can also be very important in the fall. Some soft mast species remain available well into winter. Some of these important species are common on smaller tree and shrub species. Hawthorne, crabapples, and mountain holly often retain their fruit well into the fall or early winter. Managing for these understory species involves creating open conditions allowing light to penetrate to the forest floor.
Walking in the forest, get to know the species that create mast. Learn where they occur. Consider when they mature and are available to the wildlife in the forest. Evaluate if the diversity of mast species provides for a diversity of wildlife species.
To learn more about managing for mast and other resources for wildlife habitat, request a copy of Management Practices for Enhancing Wildlife Habitat or Forest Stewardship Series #5: Wildlife (see contact information below).
The Pennsylvania Forest Stewardship Program provides publications on a variety of topics related to woodland management for private landowners. For a list of free publications, call 1-800-235-WISE (toll-free), send e-mail to , or write to: Forest Stewardship Program, Forest Resources Extension, The Pennsylvania State University, 320 Forest Resources Building, University Park, PA 16802. The Pennsylvania Bureau of Forestry and USDA Forest Service, in partnership with the Penn State's Forest Resources Extension, sponsor the Forest Stewardship Program in Pennsylvania.
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